{"id":19646,"date":"2012-02-15T13:00:30","date_gmt":"2012-02-15T18:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nybg.org\/plant-talk\/?p=19646"},"modified":"2013-01-23T12:22:22","modified_gmt":"2013-01-23T17:22:22","slug":"is-there-a-witch-in-witch-hazel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/2012\/02\/around-the-garden\/is-there-a-witch-in-witch-hazel\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there a Witch in Witch-hazel?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joyce H. Newman is the editor of Consumer Reports\u2019 GreenerChoices.org<\/a>, and has been a Garden Tour Guide with The New York Botanical Garden<\/a> for the past six years.<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\"Hamamelis<\/a>In the midst of winter’s blustery winds and wicked temperatures, it’s a great relief to see the warm yellow flowers of witch-hazel (Hamamelis x intermedia<\/em>) brightening up the Garden path behind the Home Gardening Center.<\/a><\/p>\n

This fragrant hybrid shrub is a relative of the North American native H. virginiana<\/em>, or common witch-hazel, a plant that is certainly a little magical to some. Lore suggests the common name refers to the forked twigs that were sometimes used in earlier times for “water-witching,” or dowsing to locate underground water. These native plants bloom in the fall rather than the winter, but are just as impressive.
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\nIn modern day applications, the aromatic extract of the leaves, twigs, and bark of the North American native plant is used commercially to make the astringent known as witch-hazel extract–found in medicines, eye-washes, lotions, and salves for soothing insect bites and burns.<\/p>\n

But as monikers go, there’s nothing witchy about witch-hazel. The name probably comes from \u201cwyche,\u201d an old English word with a root different from that of the wicked witches we know from film and literature; it originally meant “flexible.” A few other plants share the name, including the wyche elm and the wyche alder, as well as the \u201cwyche hazel.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How much witchcraft really lurks in witch-hazel?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":156,"featured_media":19686,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[952,1439],"tags":[2215,2214,2213,1270],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Hamamelis-x-intermedia-Bernstein-01.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ph0lU-56S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19646"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/156"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19646"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32581,"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19646\/revisions\/32581"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/plant-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}